by Naomi Hughes
“Not exactly,” he cuts in.
“What?”
“Your brother. He’s not exactly dead.”
And just like that the world closes in around me. No more sirens, no more fire alarm. Only me and Dr. Matthew Lerato, murderer, who says my brother isn’t exactly dead.
I stop backing away. The rage mixes with a frantic sort of hope, the kind I know is almost certainly false but can’t help reaching for anyway.
Unable to stop myself, I look at Quint.
He catches my eye. Takes a breath. He opens his mouth—and nothing comes out. His face is blank, shocked. Terrified.
I’m on my own. I turn back to Matthew, hesitate, clench and unclench my hands again. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” I say at last.
“It means I know what’s happening to you. And I can tell you—if you come with me, right now.”
The sirens are almost upon us. My maybe-hallucination can’t help me, and Kyle might not be dead, and this boy who I almost know says he has the answers I’ve been desperate for.
I take a step forward.
“No,” Quint says. My gaze jerks to him. He’s still unmoving, still terrified, but now he’s focused on me and there’s something dark and jagged in his voice. “Don’t trust him,” he tells me. “Run.”
But the hope pulls and tugs and burns and it’s so much more powerful and so much more painful than the fury. “Somewhere public,” I tell Matthew before I can stop myself.
He’s headed for the street already, stuffing his gun back in his pocket. “Fine. Where?” he calls over his shoulder.
I hesitate. The janitor’s nails have stopped scraping against the concrete. Someone is shouting just around the corner—one of the agents who was working late, probably—and flashing police lights are reflecting blue and red off the buildings at the end of the block. All I’d need to do is wait a few more seconds, and Matthew would be caught.
I square my shoulders, stride forward, and grab his arm. “Follow me.”
The Pie Hole is a 24-hour truck stop tucked away beneath an overpass, permanently guarded by a cadre of homeless people and stray dogs. The vinyl seats are cracked, the jukebox only plays ‘80s pop, and the ceiling rattles every time a truck hits the on-ramp—but the familiar smell of tart cherries and flaky crust and creamy meringue wrap tight around me like a childhood quilt, and for this conversation, I’m going to need that.
“You have twenty minutes before I decide whether to turn you in,” I tell Matthew flatly as soon as the waitress seats us.
Quint is sitting next to him, head bowed over the table, hands buried in his hair, silent, still. He didn’t look at either of us during the half-mile jog from the agency office, and he hasn’t moved since we sat down. I can’t blame him. I can barely look at him, either. If Matthew is the blackmailer, then who is this shadow I’ve been tied to for three weeks?
“We’ll be done in ten,” Matthew says. His gaze slides to the red-eyed truckers in the booth opposite ours, and he lowers his voice. “After that, I’d be screwed anyway. They can track me if I stay out too long.”
“Who can track you?” I keep my voice level and my posture rigid. Ask questions, get answers. That’s all I’m here for.
He scowls, like it should be obvious. “The agency.”
“Why is the agency tracking you?”
He takes off his glasses and sighs, cleaning them on the edge of his hoodie. The motion is unnervingly familiar. “It’s a long story, and I’m betting you’d rather spend our ten minutes on your own issues.”
I put my fisted hands on the table and lean forward. “Like why you tried to kill me? It was you who set the bomb, wasn’t it?” I struggle to keep my voice down. Ask questions, get answers. Focus.
He slides his glasses back on. “That was before I had all the facts about the situation,” he says, “and if you’d been in my position at the time, you’d have done the same thing.” A vision flashes through my mind: a trainmaster with empty eyes, there one moment and gone the next. Unnerved, I shake it away. “Never,” I snarl. “I would never.”
His lips thin out. “Not killing is easy when you never have to make a choice.”
The waitress approaches with our orders and we’re forced into silence. It seethes with the things he’s said and I want to leave, want to hurt him, want to go someplace where I can breathe, but—not yet. Not until I get what I came for.
The pie plates clatter to the table. My order is a slice of cherry rhubarb, and I take a bite to keep myself quiet until the waitress moves out of earshot. Matthew follows suit and then makes a face. “This is awful,” he says. The waitress doesn’t even bother to give him a dirty look.
I take another bite. “Yeah, the apple is the only good kind here,” I reply, in what I hope is a normal voice.
Matthew motions at my cherry rhubarb. “Then why didn’t you get it?”
I push the pie away. The waitress is out of range now and I won’t waste time on chitchat. “I want to know what was on the tablet. And I want to know about Kyle.” I try to tamp down the hope but it leaks into my voice anyway.
He smiles a strange little smile, half sad, half resigned. “You’ll know soon enough.” He taps his fork against his plate. “But you have another problem—when you woke up after the bomb, a few things were different about the city, right?”
I narrow my eyes but allow him to temporarily sidetrack me, because I need these answers too. “My apartment was empty and the streets were dry. And there was no evidence of your attempt at mass murder.”
A wall of force and fire. I don’t shake the memory off this time. It grounds me, keeps me aware of who I’m with and what he’s done and how very unsafe I am.
At Matthew’s side, Quint drops his hands to the table. He lays them flat, pauses like he’s gathering his strength, and lifts his head. His gaze is still carefully trained on the middle distance and not on either of us, but he’s listening.
Matthew nods. “That’s because you weren’t in the same place anymore. After the bomb, you shifted to an alternate timeline.”
Quint inhales. He closes his eyes like he’s in pain.
“Explain,” I demand.
Matthew checks his watch and his expression tightens a few notches. “An alternate timeline is a kind of parallel reality: several versions of the same world existing in side-by-side dimensions, mostly the same, but with some minor deviations that can have a ripple effect—”
“I watch sci-fi, I know what an alternate timeline is,” I hiss. I’m gripping the edge of the table now and it’s splintering beneath my nails, but I don’t let go. Ask questions, get answers. Ask questions, get answers. “How could I have switched to a different timeline? And why should I believe anything you say?”
Matthew’s words are clipped. “My best guess is that the life-or-death scenario triggered your abilities. The bomb went off and then you shifted yourself here.” He leans forward. “And you should believe what I say, Camryn Kingfisher, because you have no other options, and because I’m telling the truth, and because I need you.”
A waitress brushes by on her way to a neighboring table. The silence simmers until she’s out of range. “For what?” I demand once she’s returned to the kitchen. “And what do you mean by my abilities?”
But Matthew shakes his head. “Later. There’s something else you need to know, right? You keep glancing at a spot next to me. Almost like there’s someone else here.”
Quint’s gaze jerks to mine. The connection is a jolt of electricity, a conduit, and the only thing flowing through it is fear. He wants me to run. He doesn’t want to hear whatever Matthew will say next, and he doesn’t want me to hear it either. But I need this information. I know I can’t trust its source, but right now my choices are limited. “Yes,” I manage. “Quint.”
“He’s me.” It’s not a question.
My mouth is dry. It takes me two tries to speak. “Why do I see you?”
A pair of truckers pass by, grumbling, and Matthew waits unt
il they’re gone to answer. “Because in your timeline, I’m dead.”
Quint’s eyes go flat, icy and eerie: too calm. He doesn’t move.
“Why am I the only one who can see him?” It’s getting harder to speak, harder to tell whether my voice is too loud. He’s giving me my answers and now I’m drowning in them.
Matthew leans forward, puts his hands flat on the table, and nods. “That,” he says, “is the right question.”
Another trucker shuffles toward the exit, a sour expression on her face. At a table a few yards away, a waitress is bent down, saying something in a low voice to the tired-looking family seated there. The mom’s lips purse and her eyes go wide, and she scoops up her baby without a word and heads for the exit.
I blink. A few minutes ago, The Pie Hole was full and busy. Now, the last trickle of customers is headed for the door and the jukebox is crooning ‘80s rock ballads to an empty room.
When I look back, Matthew’s hands aren’t on the table anymore. “I should’ve said eight minutes,” he says lightly, but he’s wearing that strange smile again, sad and resigned.
I open my mouth but before I can say anything, the cushion on my bench dips, announcing that someone has sat down next to me. I scoot away and turn to tell the stranger that the booth is taken—and then I go still.
“I miss the days when I was the only one getting in trouble at three o’clock in the morning,” Kyle says, and folds his hands atop the table.
Deep in some dark, murky place inside my soul, I knew that my brother was dead. Knew it, no matter what Matthew said. The familiar agony of it has been shifting and cracking inside me for hours like the plates beneath the earth. So when I see him, wonderfully but utterly impossibly alive, the fissures grind and rumble and gape because—
Something is off.
It takes me a few seconds to place it.
“Hi, Dr. Lerato,” Kyle says. His voice is level and his smile is easy, but there’s violence in his eyes and he still hasn’t looked at me. “The agency sends you greetings, in the form of a few dozen heavily-armed gunmen surrounding this building. Though as the designated negotiator, I, of course, am unarmed, in case you were wondering.”
“Your source told you to come alone,” Matthew replies. His hands are still under the table.
My brother tilts his head. “I never do as I’m told. Now. Put your gun away and let my sister go or I’ll kill you.”
Matthew raises his brow. “You said you were unarmed. You’re hardly in a position to make personal threats.”
Kyle smiles his sharp-edged smile. “I didn’t say I would kill you with a gun.”
Their hands. That’s what’s wrong.
Matthew’s hands are still under the table—because he’s got his gun out, most likely. But more important are Kyle’s hands. They’re clasped together in a white-knuckled grip, rough and callused, darkened by oil around the nails because he works on his bike in his free time.
But not bandaged. Not bloody, not scraped raw.
A rusted wheel dripping with blood.
Not scorched, not injured, not blown to pieces.
A wall of force and fire.
Alternate timeline. Not my timeline.
Not my Kyle.
And not exactly dead.
Matthew’s gaze shifts to me. “If you get away, come find me. I’ll tell you what was on the tablet.” He closes his eyes.
Kyle leaps out of his seat. Too slow.
Matthew lifts his hands. In one is his steampunk stun gun, aimed at me. In the other is a palm-sized metal orb. He drops it.
It hits the vinyl with a tinny rattle and explodes into a supernova.
The world flares into brilliance. The light curls through my brain, burns me and blinds me. Glass shatters. Gunshot. Quint cries out my name.
Someone is hunched over me, shielding me with his body. He smells like expensive aftershave and forty-weight oil. Not my Kyle, but still my Kyle.
The light fades. From under my brother’s arm, I squint at the table. Matthew is gone. Our forgotten pies are skewered with broken glass from the window, and the cherry sauce in mine shines against the shards like bright blood. Mom would’ve hated that. Cherry rhubarb was her favorite order.
Beneath the booth, Kyle’s hand is splayed on the ground atop a sleek black gun.
I look from it to the broken window. “I thought you were unarmed,” I say. My voice is distant and dreamlike in my own ears—an aftereffect of the light bomb, or my own shock?
Kyle doesn’t answer. I push out from beneath him, and he rolls lifelessly off.
My breath stutters and I’m on my knees, leaned over him, checking his pulse with shaking fingers—but he’s alive, his heartbeat drumming steady and strong, his eyes open but unresponsive.
I grip the edge of the table and leverage myself to my feet. Glass shards bite into my fingers, but I ignore the pain, because throughout the whole restaurant, everyone is frozen. A waitress is stopped midstride two booths over, her head turned and her mouth half open. The last trucker is staring blankly into the parking lot. The cashier is reaching for a button on the register, his finger hovering inches away, unmoving.
I step past my brother. Past the cashier and the trucker, empty-eyed dolls in a silent museum. Through the front door. Into the midnight air that drapes around my shoulders, warm and pie scented.
On the street out front, on the interstate overhead, cars are stopped. Three or four have collided and their drivers are slouched over inflated airbags. The rest of the vehicles are gliding to a halt on curbs and sidewalks and in the middle of the street, and in their seats people are gripping steering wheels and staring at nothing. A block away, tires screech as cars with conscious drivers try to navigate the cluttered road.
Paralyzed. Everyone within sight of the light bomb has been paralyzed, except me. And, apparently, Matthew.
What about the heavily armed gunmen? How long will their paralysis last, and what will they do with me when they wake up?
If you get away, Matthew said.
My brother’s bike is leaned up against the restaurant wall, helmet dangling from the handlebars, key in the ignition. I can sense Quint behind me as I stride toward it, but I’m not ready to look at him yet. Heart racing, I shove the helmet over my head, then sling myself onto the glossy black machine and start the engine.
I pause. Swallow. Stare back through the broken front window at the skewered pies, and think about expensive aftershave and forty-weight oil.
Quint has already climbed on behind me. He leans forward over my shoulder and turns his head: icy, eerie, too calm. I’ve spent so long trying to figure out who and what he is, and now that I know I want to take it all back.
“Run,” he tells me.
And this time, I listen.
When I’m ten miles away, I stop and call Kyle from a pay phone.
This time he picks up. “You do remember you failed your road test.” His voice is unsteady, flat, and tightly wound—but I soak it up like rain in the desert because my brother is okay. My brother is okay, my brother is alive, and I don’t care which version of him it is because he’s not dead and it’s not my fault and for the first time in hours I can finally breathe again.
“Risk I had to take,” I reply when I’m sure the words will come out smooth. Then, because I’ve been fleeing for fifteen minutes with no sign of pursuit: “You said we were surrounded.”
“I also said I knew how to kill someone without a gun.”
I’m silent.
“I’m an analyst,” he says after a moment, still with that odd tight shakiness. “I barely know how to kill someone with a gun. The agency would’ve never let me near that negotiation, if they even bothered to negotiate at all.”
I close my eyes and sag against the phone booth. Your source told you to come alone, Matthew said. And he had. For me? “You were bluffing.”
“And you were dead.”
My eyes snap open and I steady myself with a hand against the booth’
s wall. “What?”
“What the hell are you doing, Cam? The last three weeks you just let us think you got blown up at the base along with everyone else and now I find out you’ve been running around with a terrorist the whole time? How could you let him be the one to tell me you were alive, to set up whatever the hell kind of meeting that was? Do you know what we went through after you and Mom … Didn’t you think about what Dad—what I—” He cuts off, and for a second there’s only breathing.
“Kyle?” My voice is barely a whisper. I’m dead. In this timeline, the other version of me is dead and gone, ashes and rubble. I’ve been mourning my brother for hours, and he’s been mourning me for weeks.
And also: Matthew is a terrorist.
There’s shouting in the background. Kyle’s voice lowers. “Look. Wherever you’re going, get there fast and get there safe, before my bosses figure out I held back vital intelligence to save my kid sister.” The line goes dead.
I drop the phone. When I ride away it’s still dangling, beeping out a busy tone, begging for another quarter.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE THIRD TIME I CRASH the bike, I can’t force myself to climb back on.
I sit at the lip of the ditch and stare down at it: side pipes hissing in the mud, wheels spinning in the air, belly up like a dead goldfish. None of the crashes have been major, but I’m too exhausted and unskilled to push myself any further tonight. There’s an abandoned barn on the horizon and it looks like as good a place as any to catch a few hours of sleep before I …
Before I do what?
I sneak a glance at Quint. He’s standing a few feet away with his hands in his pockets and the moonrise gleaming through his torso, not looking at me in the same way he’s been not looking at me for the last hour.
It’s torture, being stuck with him. The emotion has been churning inside me, growing with every minute, every mile. I hate who he is, hate what the other version of him has done to me—and at the same time I feel so terribly, impossibly cheated. Because that boy from an hour ago, the mysterious maybe-hallucination who I could talk to and was maybe even starting to like a little, he’s gone forever. I despise myself for missing him, and I despise Matthew for taking him away from me, and I despise not knowing how to stop feeling things I shouldn’t feel about people who aren’t even alive.